Pooria Azizi

Development of a Humanistically-oriented Book Evaluation Inventory and a Comparative Evaluation of Top Notch vs. Prospect Series

ABSTRACT Textbooks play a crucial role in language learning classrooms The problem ischoosing among a great number of available textbooks on the market to see whichone is more appropriate for a specific classroom with an idiosyncratic group oflearners since each group has different needs Different schools of thought have putforward different ideologies for the nature of language learning and languageteaching the most recent of which is the humanistic approach As the name implies the humanistic approach puts learners at the center of learning with a focus on theiremotions and different needs This school of thought placed us on the task ofdeveloping a Humanistically oriented Book Evaluation Inventory and exploring itsreliability and underlying factor structure For this purpose the text driven approachwhich is the best indicator of the humanistic approach was used in developing thequestionnaire In devising the items elements of text driven approach such as affect localization rich exposure and cognitive engagement were targeted Thequestionnaire has 39 items and uses Likert type scale giving each item a value rangingfrom 1 to 5 respectively 1 for strongly disagree 2 for disagree 3 for neutral 4 for agree and5 for strongly agree In addition Brian Tomlinson s a well known scholar in materialsdevelopment was sought for content validation of the questionnaire After theexploratory factor analysis the modified version of HBEI was administered to 400teachers of Top Notch and Prospect series to see how much they are humanistic Theresults of the study show that although a number of shortcomings and drawbackswere found in both series teachers perceived Top Notch series more in line with thehumanistic approach Keywords Humanistic Approach Material Evaluation Material Development Text Driven Approach VII